Contemporary ventilators often provide for the use of ventilation “procedures”, which may require a transient change in ventilator operation. Examples of such ventilation procedures include pre-oxygenating a patient for several minutes prior to suctioning the airway, transiently occluding the patient circuit at the end of an exhalation, changing the O2 delivery percentage for the purpose of Functional Residual Capacity measurement, etc.
Associated with these ventilation procedures, it is often desirable to modify the behavior of the monitoring device, either to initiate a measurement or to protect the monitoring device from damage. Conversely, it is also often desirable to initiate certain ventilation procedures in association with an attempt to take a reading of a specific monitoring parameter.
Historically, ventilators and monitoring devices have typically been separate units having their own displays and user interfaces. However, by the present invention it is recognized as desirable to integrate the ventilator and monitoring device functions to operate as a single respiratory care system. By this innovative system approach, monitoring data from the monitoring device is displayed together with ventilation therapy information on a single configurable display. Although some examples of this concept are shown in the prior art, as for example critical care monitoring devices that can receive and display certain ventilation therapy information via serial communication attachments, the prior art devices do not fully integrate the active behaviors of the ventilator and the monitoring device. In other words, while prior art monitoring and ventilation devices have been integrated in terms of the data that is moved between them, they are not integrated as to their active behaviors so as to achieve desired clinical performance.
The prior art ventilation and monitoring devices thus require individual adjustments by the user to effect a desired therapy or simple physiologic measurement behavior. This can require time consuming and tedious manual operations and therefore undesirably reduces system efficiency.
Like the relationship that exists between ventilation and monitoring devices, a similar inter-relationship exists between currently available ventilators and various other medical devices. For example, imaging devices such as MRI, CAT scans and radiograms, as well as drug delivery devices such as nebulizers and syringe pumps, are utilized in the same operating environment as the prior art ventilation devices. In some cases, when the medical device is operated to perform a medical procedure, the operation of the ventilator must be modified in order to provide the optimal conditions for the performance of the medical procedure. For example, at the start of a lung radiogram, it is desirable for the ventilator to inflate the lungs to a specific pressure level. In currently available systems, the ventilator must be manually operated independently from the operation of the radiogram to obtain the desired lung pressure.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method that integrates the active behaviors of a ventilator and either a monitoring device and/or other medical device so as to efficiently and automatically achieve a single desired clinical performance. More specifically, it is desirable to provide a method whereby a monitoring device, a medical device and a ventilator provide appropriate inputs into the control of each other's behavior. It is desirable to achieve this integrated behavior automatically, thereby reducing the amount of tedious, non-value added tasks to be conducted by a clinician. Further, it is desirable to achieve this behavior automatically such that the desired actions are performed accurately to provide proper integrity to the acquired monitored data. It is also desirable to perform these actions automatically so as to maximize protection of the equipment being utilized.